WASHINGTON — The group of Utah counties supporting construction of the Uinta Basin Railway has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the appeals court decision blocking the project, as it had indicated was its intent.
The website Colorado Newsline reports the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition filed the petition on March 4, asking the court to review the decision last August by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That decision called Surface Transportation Board approval of the Uinta Basin “arbitrary and capricious,” flawed for its failure to consider downstream environmental impacts of such things as potential rail accidents involving the oil to be transported, or of the drilling and refining of the oil [see “Federal court strikes down approval …,” Trains News Wire, Aug, 18, 2023].
Seven County had made clear its plans to appeal when it asked the state of Utah to help fund the legal effort, saying the appeals court decision “treads all over states’ rights and interstate commerce” [see “Utah counties seek state funding …,” News Wire, Feb. 3, 2024].
In its petition to the Supreme Court, the coalition cites a 2004 Supreme Court decision, Department of Transportation vs. Public Citizen, and says that courts of appeal have split on the question of considering downstream effects in an environmental review. Five circuits have read that decision to mean that an agency’s environmental review can stop where its regulatory authority stops — which would be the view taken by the STB in the Uinta Basin decision — while two have said the decision requires review of “any impact that can be called reasonably foreseeable.” Therefore, it asks the court to decide “Whether the National Environmental Policy Act requires an agency to study environmental impacts beyond the proximate effects of the action over which the agency has regulatory authority.”
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